What +1 Means For You (And Me)

Back in April 2011, Google unveiled what would be its version of “Like” or “Retweet”, in respect to Facebook and Twitter. Recently, I’ve found myself unabashed, stating “I’d plus one that“. Too easily, I fall into these social media/real life crossover effects. In an article from webseoanayltics.com, I discovered what exactly the +1 feature does.

It has effects on click through rates for ads and websites, weighs in on search engine optimization and works as a bookmarking feature (which is much more evident if you are a Google+ user). On Google+, your profile has a +1 tab where you can view everything you have +1’d. Articles you post or posts in general have a +1 for their popularity or a number totalling the number of people who have added a +1 to the post.

In regards to SEO, “Google already uses data from 3rd party Social Media sites (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr etc) as signals to determine the Search Engine Results. As a result we should expect that the number of +1s of a page will be used as asignal on the future. Nevertheless by definition the +1 button gives more weight to what your friends think as important and as a result we should expect that it will carry more weight when one of your contacts voted for a particular page,” states Vasilis Vryniotis, who wrote the article The New Google +1 Button and the Effects on SEO. He went on to state ‘As we said above the +1 button will allow users recommend and share content with their friends and it will be visible next to the search results. Along with them the logged in users will be able to see if the people that belong to their Social Circle have +1’d any of the pages that appear in SERPs. Currently the Social Circle is calculated based on the data that come from Gmail, Google Talk, Google Contacts, Google Reader and Google Buzz. Nevertheless Google says that on the near future they will incorporate information from other 3rd party networks such as Twitter, Flickr etc.”

On Google’s website describing +1, they state, “Sometimes it’s easier to find exactly what you’re looking for when someone you know already found it. Get recommendations for the things that interest you, right when you want them, in your search results”. The main point of this article, published soon after the release of +1, is that the more people that +1 this blog post on Social Ed Culture, the more likely it is to pop up higher on the list of results for a google search related to this article or with words within my “tags”. So please, +1 this article!

2 Comments on “What +1 Means For You (And Me)”

It’s still so new, it’s been out for roughly four weeks (still in beta mode), it took months for Twitter & Facebook to catch on. I think it’s worth adopting Google+ and waiting until others catch on. Plus the fact that the real eye catching features for Google+ probably aren’t available yet.